car insurance who is covered

Surprise! Find out who is not covered by your car insurance

Nobody likes to discover what’s not covered in their policy while trying to make a claim. Here are some situations in which you think you’re covered but your car insurance company might not.

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Scenario 1. Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, says auto insurance policyholders are often confused about when to add a child who has gotten a driver’s license.

“Some insurance companies will not cover drivers that are under the age of 18, unless they are specifically added to your policy,” Worters says.

To be on the safe side, she says, contact your car insurance agent to make sure your policy covers a teen driver.

Scenario 2 Holly Anderson, spokesperson for State Farm Insurance, says all drivers living in your home should be listed on the car insurance policy.

A teen driver who wrecks the car is still covered even if you failed to add him or her to the policy. But “you could then be subject to an underwriting review and lose your coverage because you didn’t report the child as a driver in the household.”

Allowing a friend to occasionally borrow your car is allowed under a car insurance policy. If the friend has an accident during one of the rare times when he or she drives your car, you’re covered.

But it’s a different story if a friend drives your car all the time.

Scenario 3“If you do not reside in the vehicle owner’s household and you drive the vehicle with any kind of regularity, in order to be covered, you will need to be listed as a driver on the vehicle owner’s policy,” Worters says.

Scnerio 4:If your pet is injured in a car accident you caused, the pet’s medical expenses may not be covered. Even though collision coverage pays for repairs to the vehicle, your policy may have an exclusion for damage to personal property – and pets are considered personal property.

But if your pet is injured in a car accident caused by someone else, you could make a third-party claim for its medical bills. When a pet is killed in an accident, you can usually make a claim for the market value of the pet.

Scnerio 5 :Sometimes car insurance customers specifically exclude a family member from their auto insurance policies.

The excluded person may be someone with a DUI conviction for whom insurance coverage is prohibitively expensive. In other cases, the excluded person could be a teenager who hasn’t gotten a license yet or who isn’t allowed to drive because of the high cost of insuring him or her.

If an excluded driver operates your car and gets in an accident, you – not your car insurance company – will be liable for the damages. There are no loopholes! Once a person is excluded, make sure he doesn’t driver your car – not even to pull it into the driveway from the street.

Yes, car insurance poilcy are tricky and not explicit. Get your cheap car insurance now, if you have missed this-start saving today.

car insurance -drivewise

One particular of the hottest developments in car insurance policy is pay-as-you-go plans that could present experienced drivers along with financial savings of up to thirty percent on costs. Examples involving pay-as-you-go insurance policies include Progressive’s Photo, State Farm’s Get Safe and sound and Help you save together with In-Drive and Allstate’s DriveWise. Typically, you put in a device into the diagnostic port of your automobile in which tracks what number of miles you push and when, how soon you increase and also switch and how hard you braking mechanism.

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Even though it is good news that these strategies can easily save you funds on car insurance, there are some details to be aware of in the fine print. Here we highlight three of them, as discussed during.

1.Can the device damage my car? It could potentially drain battery if don’t drive a lot

@CoverageQueen: The device uses a certain amount of current from the vehicle’s battery even when the vehicle is not turned on. Care should be taken in using the device in vehicles that have old or weak batteries or that may go extended periods without being started, in accordance with Progressive’s Snapshot website.

2. Will certainly my rates go up? As together with many car insurance plans, there’s always exceptions

@CoverageQueen: Though pay-as-you-go insurance providers say that your rates will not increase should you fail to meet the requirements, there are a few exceptions. For instance with Snapshot, if you live in Rhode Island, you may see an increase in your rate – up to 9 percent – based on your driving, according to the company website. If you can’t change your driving performance to reduce your rate, you can cancel at any time, and Progressive will stop using any driving information you shared with them. Again, with Snapshot, drivers in Alabama should be aware that if they leave the program, up to 12 months of data may be used for renewal pricing purposes.

3. Do the savings on car insurance apply to all types of coverage? Not always

@CoverageQueen: Typically, savings will not apply to all types of car insurance, and each state has its own laws pertaining to how this is administered. For instance, Snapshot applies the savings to premiums for bodily injury, property damage and collision, dependent upon state regulations.

teen auto insurance and ways to spy

michael turner : Is there any way to spy on teen drivers – this is for their safety and getting cheap teen auto ins- yes saving is important. Spy- get them safe and get cheap teen auto ins for huge savings

Response : Michael Turner, thanks for the awesome question comming from you. Obviously, of course your teenager doesn’t text with you in the passenger seat.

Of course she doesn’t do a big, smoky burnout while you stand in the driveway. As a parent you are worried- and the insurance companies are with you to help you.

If you ever wondered what happens once your spawn turns the corner, you have another option: a private eye.- the wait is over.

StreetEyes is a new service aimed at parents and business owners who want to see how drivers perform once their backs are turned. StreetEyes says its operators will follow at a discreet distance, filming the car, capturing its speed and tracking it by GPS, then report back to you, at a cost of $30 for a 20-minute session. The rate gets cheaper if you book more sessions.

“Being an insurance agent for almost 10 years, I have been dealing with the anguish parents feel about their teens starting to drive,” founder Jim Lipjanic says.

StreetEyes enters an already competitive snooping-on-teens market. A worried parent has several other options, and some of those could result in a car insurance rate discount.

Four other ways to snoop

Progressive’s Snapshot discount  , for example, plugs a black box into your car for an extended period, sending data back to the insurance company that tells it how much you’re driving, when (between midnight and 4 a.m. is the worst), and whether you take chances it doesn’t like (hard braking and speeds over a certain point). After a few months, Progressive calculates your discount and takes its box back.

State Farm’s In – Drive  works similarly, piggybacking through OnStar technology to monitor driving. But the program keeps right on monitoring as long as you’re a participant with an active subscription.

Ford’s  MyKey technology lets parents reconfigure the key given to teenagers with limits on speed, stereo volume , and a “belt minder” chime. It’s standard on all Fords built since 2010.

Various phone apps allow parents to block calls and texting while a car is moving. Other apps will track your child’s speed, report his location, even upload video (recorded in a constant loop) in the event of an accident. Prices for the software range from free to as much as $300.

And none of them will creep out your 16-year-old daughter as much as a stranger trailing her in a van.

You can know how your teen drives, gurad your pressure and more over save and get cheap teen auto ins with the main focus of teen safety.

Get your cheap teen auto insurance quotes here- now.

Kamlesh

State Farm is the latest insurer promising fat discounts for anyone willing to install an electronic snoop in their car.

Called In-Drive, the voluntary program is similar to Progressive’s Snapshot . You stick a device in the vehicle’s diagnostic port, usually under the steering wheel (most vehicles from 1996 on have this), and State Farm monitors your driving habits. Participants could qualify for discounts up to 50 percent on their auto insurance premiums if the data shows what good drivers they are, says Kip Diggs, spokesperson for State Farm.

So, what does In-Drive track? How far you drive and when, how fast you accelerate and turn, and how hard you brake.

In other words, pretty much the same criteria used by Snapshot, which Progressive says can reel in up to a 30percent discount if the motorist is top-notch and doesn’t drive too much or during high-accident hours (the worst, the so-called “vampire hours,” are from midnight to 4 a.m.).

Missy Lundberg, a State Farm spokesperson, says that participants will immediately receive about a 10 percent discount on premiums for liability, medical payments, collision and comprehensive coverage. She added that up to a further 20 percent could be trimmed if you don’t go above the national average of 12,000 miles a year.

Additional discounts would come over time, depending on how safely you drive and when you drive. Customers can track their performance, and the progress of discounts, at State Farm’s website. Progressive’s Snapshot users can do the same.

The OnStar connection

One of the big differences between these insurance giants’ usage-based programs is that Progressive’s Snapshot is just that, a temporary peek at your driving habits used as the basis to calculate your rates. After six months, you unplug the device and ship it back.

State Farm takes the game a step further by wrapping In-Drive inside OnStar, the popular onboard telematics device until now found mainly on General Motors cars. OnStar provides one-touch emergency response, roadside assistance, help locating a stolen vehicle, vehicle diagnostics alerts and maintenance reminders, and family-friendly features like mapping and speed alerts.

“This combined offering represents a first in our industry,” says Mike Wey, State Farm’s senior vice president. “It will provide … for a smarter vehicle and even smarter driver.”

The OnStar/In-Drive combination reports data for as long as the motorist chooses to have the program on his teen auto insurance policy , allowing State Farm a longer-term look at a driver’s habits.

In-Drive is currently offered only in Illinois, but Diggs says more states will be added next year. The insurer plans to announce exactly which states in the coming months.

Despite the discount promise, the devices do come with a price tag, mostly for the OnStar service. Diggs says the package is free for the first six months after a $10 activation fee. After that, there’s a $5 to $15 monthly charge, depending on the extent of the OnStar service.

If you were to buy OnStar separately, General Motors and Best Buy offer a stand-alone unit that costs $300 plus $75 for installation and $199 for an annual subscription.

Discounts versus privacy

Some wonder what State Farm and Progressive will do with the information gathered in pursuit of discounts — and worry that privacy could be compromised if the information is passed around.

“I’d probably go for it, but I’m a very careful driver,” says Jessica Ruiz, who is insured by another carrier but might give State Farm a look because of In-Drive. “I imagine I’d qualify, but it makes you feel uncomfortable that they are creating a file on you. … Doesn’t everyone know too much about us already?”

Another motorist, David Sanderson, was also concerned about In-Drive’s intrusiveness. But he, too, loved the possibility of a discount and the OnStar advantage. “I’m sort of feeling like giving up (on the privacy issue) because it just seems hopeless for the consumer,” he says. “I’ve already looked into (Snapshot) and will probably look into this one (In-Drive) as well.”

For privacy details, State Farm representatives point you to the company website, which says the insurer “may share policyholder information as required or permitted by law and as stated in the State Farm Privacy Policy, as amended from time to time. State Farm will not sell your information to a third party.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), says his group hasn’t investigated programs such as In-Drive or Snapshot in great detail, but red flags go up whenever information on consumers is compiled.

“We’d be concerned that (gathered information) could be shared with third parties” that could compromise the driver, Rotenberg says.

Sharon Goott Nissim, EPIC’s consumer privacy counsel, was more specific, saying that the information could be used in advertising targeted at consumers or shared with the police in driving-related investigations, especially those involving accidents.

“There is the question of how this collected data is retained,” she explains. “We don’t know how the company is dealing with this data — they could be turning the data into your (driving) score and then discarding the raw data as they use it to update the score.

“However, they could also be retaining the data,” Goott Nissim says. “They could be disclosing the data to commercial partners, particularly locational data, which is very valuable to advertisers. Also, law enforcement may seek out data — and insurance companies may be willing” to give it.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author Kamlesh.

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This is the time of the year when car accidents due to deer hitting your car are high.

Cars strike more than 1 million deer each year, mostly during the fall mating season. Each of those collisions represents about $3,100 in damage to vehicles, according to insurer State Farm.

These are the most common questions readers have submitted about deer-vehicle collisions and car insurance coverage.

To be covered for a run-in with a deer, you need to have comprehensive coverage as part of your car insurance policy. Although the accident with the deer wasn’t your fault, your comprehensive deductible amount will be due.

You might think a deer strike would be covered by collision, since this coverage normally covers when your car has an impact with another vehicle or object; however, contact with animals (wild or domestic) is specifically listed as a loss covered by “other than collision” or comprehensive coverage on policies normally.

If you have a liability-only policy, then you should know that your policy doesn’t cover your vehicle for any damages it receives in an accident with a deer or of any other object since a liability policy covers the damage you do unto others and not your own vehicle.

Read more: If I have liability only, am I covered for a deer collision?

When you make contact with a deer, your claim is filed under comprehensive coverage; however, if you swerve to miss a deer and crash, it is a collision claim.

Although it may have been a deer that started the chain of events that led to you to crash the car, if your vehicle didn’t actually have contact with the animal, then it isn’t a comprehensive claim. If you collide with another car or an object (such as a guardrail or tree) or roll your vehicle, then you need to make the claim for your damages under your collision coverage.

Read more: If I dodge a deer and wreck my car, am I covered?

No. Presently, there aren’t any states that will pay for repairs to your vehicle, or even your deductible, if you hit a deer. Yes, your state may have an agency to manage the deer population, but it’s not as if they can prevent deer from running into the roadway; especially during mating and migration season.

There have been a few states where proposals have called for the state to pay for damages, or a set amount like $250, to a car owner after his vehicle has been hit a deer.  So far, none of these bills has been passed into law.

Read more: Will the state pay my deductible if I hit a deer?

In general, car insurance companies don’t require you to get a police report to file a comprehensive claim for running into the deer, but it’s advisable to get one anyway.

Having a police report backing up your claim that your car’s damages were due to contact with a deer will help you be able to place this claim under your comprehensive coverage. If the claims adjuster is not able to validate your claim that you hit a deer, there is the possibility that the claim may end up under your collision coverage instead.

Even if your insurance provider doesn’t require a police report, your state may require a police or crash report be filed for accidents where there is any injury, or property damage above a certain amount.

Read more: Do I need to report a collision even if I don’t have a claim?

Comprehensive claims, such as one for hitting a deer, don’t typically increase your car insurance rates. However, with many companies, if you file a certain number of claims within a specified period your rates can go up. So, if you already have had a few auto insurance claims in the past few years with your car insurance company, then this one could push your premiums higher due to the amount of claims you’ve made in total, not just this specific claim.